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Illegal Bitcoin mining farm cracked down by Chinese police

According to a report by Xin’an Evening , a Bitcoin mining farm was cracked down by local police force in Bengbu, Anhui Province. The local electric power company lost around 1,000 RMB a day for the past 6 months.

Starting from 19th May, Power Company discovered that the line loss rate of a local community surged to 97% while normal number should be 5%. An inspection team was dispatched to check the household power meters one by one but nothing unusual detected. At the end of last month, inspectors found an extra white cable attached to the starter box in a building, which leads to a room on ground floor. Then they discovered that the front door of the apartment was blocked by brick and mortar and window by dark curtain but the sound of machine in operation cannot be fully suppressed. They broke into the house next day along with policeman and found 50 sets of Bitcoin ASIC miners busy digging.
Actually it’s nothing new to the Chinese community since stealing power might be the only way for an individual miner to make his business profitable. Similar news popped up from time to time. Just to name a few:2015-12-29 Bitcoin miners theft case, 1.6 million involved2016-03-27 Illegal Bitcoin mining farm with 200 Bitcoin miners cracked down2016-06-02 3 Bitcoin mining site busted, 74 miners detained
As per blockmeta , the Bitcoin network difficulty will be 312,267,622,672, a 8.9% gain over the last 14 days . We are seeing new players in the arena like the new 14nm chips manufacturers or government-funded projects like and Weiyuanyungu’s Data center with hosting capability up to 150,000 units in Inner Mongolia, , aside from the well-known Xinjiang data center of Bitmain.

The race for hashing rate is so fierce that even professional miners are under pressure. Jiang Zhuo’er, owner of lbtc1btc mining pool, claimed that he had sold all of his LTC miners in October.

“to make room for next generation chips”

Back to the illegal mining farm case, as per the calculation of power company, at 1000kw/h per unit, the 50 miners is burning 51 KW an hour, 1224 KW a day, which means the power company lost 960 RMB daily. If the mining farm had been online since 19th May, then the thief managed to make gross profit of 182,000 RMB, or 230,000 KW from the free power.

The mysterious disappearance of Friedcat, founder of ASICMINER, was said to be associated with a similar case.

Usually at the end of such news released by the authority, police would say:

We are still chasing the people behind this.

In fact, we never heard of anyone get caught for stealing power, which is considered state-owned property.

Learn cryptocurrency and digital assets since 2013 and co-founder of 8btc in 2014. Co-author of 2014-2015 Digital Currency Development Report(2015) and first author of Investment Guidelines To Blockchain Digital Currency (Published in June 2017 ISBN:9787300239286).

” In fact, we never heard of anyone get caught for stealing power, which is considered state-owned property. ” ^smile^ …. So the mining of bitcoins was not illegal, but the theft of electricity from the government is deemed illegal. We just have to make this clear, before some Coke induced journalist catch onto this story, and say that Bitcoin mining is made illegal in China. They are so hyped up and over eager, that they do not even read the content or do some basic research on their stories.Summary : Bitcoin miner steals electricity

Quote from: Kakmakr on December 14, 2016, 09:55:29 AM
” In fact, we never heard of anyone get caught for stealing power, which is considered state-owned property. ” ^smile^ …. So the mining of bitcoins was not illegal, but the theft of electricity from the government is deemed illegal. We just have to make this clear, before some Coke induced journalist catch onto this story, and say that Bitcoin mining is made illegal in China. They are so hyped up and over eager, that they do not even read the content or do some basic research on their stories.Summary : Bitcoin miner steals electricity

If they want to make a profit in China, they should at least simply start an honest company for mining bitcoin. I prefer your headline instead of the one the journalists write the article, more precise in the content.Don’t steal the electricity, crime doesn’t pay in the long term.

What would happen to bitcoin if it became a real threat to the yuan and the government just forcibly shut down all their mines? Would bitcoin die because you can’t really have a network with 70% of miners suddenly disappear?

Before the next difficulty adjustment things might move very slowly. After that, there might be fierce competition to start spinning up miners in other locations around the world to collect some of the now much easier to mine BTC.

So hopefully if mining in China was shut down completely, enough people would try to get in on the new lower difficulty mining action and the network would balance out over time.

I first heard about bitcoin from a guy who oversaw the local university’s student PC work area (at a university in the US), back in 2010 (if I recall correctly).

He said “What is Bitcoin? These Chinese exchange students keep coming in here and running this software day and night, and leaving it running in the background on each PC. I think it’s some kind of game or looking for E.T. or something.”

I was like, “um, no, if they are that dedicated, it has to be for money.”

And then I used Google, read up on Bitcoin, and started my buy-and-hold spree the very next day. It wasn’t easy back then. I think my first bitcoins arrived in about ten days. I eventually got hooked up with Mt. Gox for my buying, and never lost any there.

I really got a break, thanks to Chinese students trying to get free electricity for mining. I can’t imagine they netted very many bitcoins.

Does anyone have more information about this new “player” in the mining game:

We are seeing new players in the arena like the new 14nm chips manufacturers or government-funded projects like and Weiyuanyungu’s Data center with hosting capability up to 150,000 units in Inner Mongolia,

Right it’ll re-adjust but i can forsee a situation where it doesn’t get to the next readjustment. Lets say the taken down occurs right after an adjustment so theres 2000 blocks to go before the next. Now 75% of the miners are offline and blocks are being found on average 40 minutes apart and. Well 80000 minutes is a long time, around 55 days. Markets would be in chaos, price would probably tank and most of all, 55 days of transactions taking so long would certainly hurt bitcoin even more.

Quote from: Kakmakr on December 14, 2016, 09:55:29 AM
” In fact, we never heard of anyone get caught for stealing power, which is considered state-owned property. ” ^smile^ …. So the mining of bitcoins was not illegal, but the theft of electricity from the government is deemed illegal. We just have to make this clear, before some Coke induced journalist catch onto this story, and say that Bitcoin mining is made illegal in China. They are so hyped up and over eager, that they do not even read the content or do some basic research on their stories.Summary : Bitcoin miner steals electricity

If they want to make a profit in China, they should at least simply start an honest company for mining bitcoin. I prefer your headline instead of the one the journalists write the article, more precise in the content.Don’t steal the electricity, crime doesn’t pay in the long term.

I thought china was banning and making bitcoin mining illegal. whew. I thought it was the end of China’s hording game.So in general, they were just caught because they were stealing electricity from the electric company’s grid. Makes me wonder, if those companies that host miners are also stealing electricity or are they really paying a low electricity fee.